MY VERY FIRST ACT as a stepmother was to build a wall. Literally. Things had already become serious, and my boyfriend of less than a year and I were talking, not for the first time, of merging our possessions and lives. Why don't you just move in? he asked.
I was crazy about my boyfriend—he was kind and accomplished, sexy, smart, and reliable. Everything about him—his love of cooking, his deadpan sarcasm, his trustworthiness, his nerdy micro-knowledge of New York City history—was endearing. But there were complications. Two of them. They were almost fifteen and eleven. The younger one, who had tousled blond hair and a depth beyond her years, lived with him; the older one, who had a guarded, beautiful smile, lived with her mother. I knew the fact that I was not the first serious girlfriend after their father's divorce might make things a little easier. But I had heard what being a stepmother was like. I had read the stories and seen the movies and listened to the gossip about friends' stepmothers. Surely, I wouldn't be like that, I thought. But my happiness was already weighted with caution.
Why didn't I just move in? It was complicated, the idea and the reality of him and me and his daughter under one roof, in ways I both could and couldn't put my finger on. It was also largely unspoken. "It's a lot to think about that you have two daughters," I said quietly and carefully as we sat on the couch and I mulled over his suggestion. His younger daughter was upstairs, and I didn't want her to hear us. Editing myself was already becoming a habit.
"Don't worry," my boyfriend replied, hugging me. "It'll be fine."
It'll be fine. I stiffened against the cushion behind me. His optimistic nonchalance, his non-answer to my non-question—it felt like an evasion—added to the anxiety that had been slowly taking over a corner of my mind. Maybe because we didn't talk about it, this whole issue—his relationship with the girls, and mine with him and his with me, and mine with them—slowly got twisted up in and mapped onto his house. The house had made me wary from the beginning. The first time I saw it, he showed me two beautifully decorated rooms on the second floor, explaining that he had moved there so that each of his daughters could have her own bedroom. "I want them to know that they can always come live here with me," he told me solemnly. The house, I found myself thinking from then on, was less a place where people lived and slept and ate, and more a stage set—hushed, meticulous, waiting for life to happen in it. Or was it a shrine to the past, a cordoned-off memorial to a happier time when he lived with his children in a less complicated way? I wasn't sure.
And then there was his bedroom. It didn't have a door. Or a wall to put the door in. It was just an open, loftlike space at the top of the stairs on the third floor. There was no privacy whatsoever—anyone on the first or second floor could hear everything going on up there. "Are you serious?" my girlfriends demanded, incredulous, when I described it. Every time I was there, I found this absence of a boundary, the permeable nature of the house, uncomfortable. All these months into our relationship, all these weekends and days and nights with his daughters later, the architecture of the house still made me feel vulnerable and exposed.
It didn't help that I literally could not get my bearings there. It was five or six times bigger than the apartment I'd been living in, and I was constantly losing things—my keys, my agenda, my purse. I seemed to spend half my time walking around in circles, frantically retracing my steps and trying to find what I'd misplaced. One evening after my boyfriend had left on his weekly six-hour trip to drop off one daughter and pick up the other, I searched for a can opener for almost an hour. I was, I felt, the outsider in many ways. I bumped my shins, tripped on carpets, struggled with locks. In the house—the beautiful, quiet space that led virtually anyone who visited to remark, "Oh, it's so peaceful!"—I was virtually never relaxed. And so on that winter morning, as we chatted about my moving in, I considered the future and announced, "Not until you get a door." After a moment I added, "And something to put a door in. Please?"
Like a lot of women who become stepmothers, I was trying to block out the stress, trying to make a peaceful place. Because stepfamily life is chaotic, confusing, and exhausting, especially in the beginning. One woman I know likened it to being thrown into the ocean during a storm. "Everybody screams, 'Swim!' and walks away from you," she said with a laugh. Another woman compared stepmothering to "setting up housekeeping on an ice floe." The analogies of trying not to drown and slipping on a constantly moving, inhospitable surface are apt. The pressures on women who partner with men who have children—to blend, to love, to come together, to fix it, to take the high road, to put his kids first, to have a sense of humor in the face of repeated rebuffs—are overwhelming. Perhaps the most intense pressure of all is to win his kids over. Our husbands love them. We hope we will love them. We hope they will love us. But everybody knows that nobody wants a stepmother.
Nobody wants a stepmother. A less frequently acknowledged but equally potent truth—and one that is without doubt more unsettling to those who stand outside it—is that nobody wants to be a stepmother either. Just as our stepchildren do not choose us, we do not choose them. They are incidental and, if we are lucky, also supplemental, a kind of add-on to the man we love. We may tell ourselves that we will love them, that we will be patient with them, that we will befriend them, that we will not have much to do with them (if they are grown), that we will let things take their own course. Regardless of what we hope for, the relationship with our stepchildren always starts from this mutual lack of choosing. They are as unessential to us as we are to them, accidental even. It is not exactly an auspicious beginning for a story. The story does not always end badly, of course. But for the majority of women, the ones who find stepmothering difficult, it may be helpful—even a tremendous relief—to get the unhappy truths about that difficulty on the table. "We wasted so much time blaming each other, feeling like failures," a woman married to a man with children told me. "If only someone had said, 'Just about everybody with stepkids goes through this, you know.'"
A litany of how and why it is difficult may send the woman considering marriage to a man with kids running—or at least give her serious pause. But for those of us already in such partnerships, the details that seem so discouraging, even depressing, to others may sound almost like an affirmation. "Aha," we think, "so this is just how stepfamilies are!" And for those of us who don't have friends who are stepmothers, and the sanity-saving reality check they can provide, knowing that we're not alone in the difficulty can help us through the day. Meanwhile, an exploration of precisely why it can feel so tough, sometimes for years on end, might help us take the struggle with his kids less personally, increasing the chances that something can be salvaged, or built, something like a friendship, or perhaps just a friendly enough, good enough, polite yet distant mutual caring.
Although it's a disappointment, it's no real surprise that when wives of men with children and those children come together, regardless of our good intentions, we are on a collision course of sorts. "These children have become so close to their parents," Patricia Papernow, a leading stepfamily expert, explains. "The challenge then is to transfer the seat of decision making and intimacy from the parent-child dyad to the couple dyad. And that can be a lot of work." The lack of rules and privacy in my husband's house pre-me, the weekends devoted to searching out stores the girls wanted to shop in, movies they wanted to see, and restaurants they wanted to have dinner in, were all par for the course for postdivorce dads. They were also routines that were hard to reconcile with romance. Just by coming into the previously child-centric picture, the stepmother-to-be changes things, and she is bound to be resented heartily for the palpable shift in priorities and the overall family culture as it segues (if all goes well) into the healthy configuration Papernow describes, in which the bond between husband and wife (or partners) becomes central. My younger stepdaughter could have been speaking for stepkids everywhere when she told me recently, "When I was eleven and you showed up, I didn't want Dad to be with anybody. I didn't think he should have a girlfriend!" The sense that you are taking something away, detracting from the amiable situation that Dad and kids have finally worked out after already adjusting to a divorce, is there no matter how kind you are.
"I had my dad all to myself and then you came along, and I felt like I was losing him," my stepdaughter explained simply. "It was like you stole him away." You want romance; they want all the attention. Nobody's in the wrong here, but it can be remarkably difficult to strike a balance. "When the stepmother-to-be joins in the weekly Friday pizza and pajama night ritual that Dad and the kids have, she sits down next to her boyfriend in front of the TV. And his little girl comes and plops right down between them, shoving her to the side," Papernow told me, explaining that this "battle of who's an insider and who's an outsider" is a typical dynamic from the earliest stages of coming together (if you can call it that).
From the perspective of the woman with stepchildren, being shoved to the side eight or ten or a hundred times is hard to ignore. And her understanding of what the kids are going through becomes tinged with resentment the longer her partner pretends that none of this is happening. By ignoring problems with his kids' behavior and adjustment—a disease to which every father who divorces and re-partners seems prone—he leaves the woman in an unenviable position, with a few equally unappealing options: she can fend for herself, feeling unsupported; tell the man something about his child that he may hear as criticism; or go silent. "I did a lot of quiet fuming, to tell you the truth," Kelly, a teacher who married a man with a ten-year-old daughter, told me. "It just seemed too petty to bring up the things she did that felt hurtful or rude. So I swallowed it." Staying quiet eventually made Kelly feel angry, hurt, and alone. This dynamic, addressed in chapter 6, can be lethal for a partnership.
A woman seriously involved with a man with kids is bound, sooner or later, to begin lobbying, subtly or not so subtly, for changes around the house. Even though she is asking for things that make sense—divorced dads are notoriously permissive—there will almost certainly be fireworks. Like millions of other stepmothers, I fell into this trap with hardly a push. Once my fiancé and I were engaged and I was spending all my time with him and his daughter, I came up against the fact that there were no discernible rules about bedtime, homework, TV, or computer use. That didn't bother my fiancé, but my needs regarding privacy, order, and especially sleep were different. I began to push, gently and then not so gently, for structure. I didn't try to enforce new rules myself—I knew that would not go over well—but instead asked my fiancé to. He was unaccustomed to asking his daughter to do things that did not suit her, however, which put us constantly at cross-purposes and reinforced my sense that she was indulged because he couldn't draw the line. In my mind, I was only trying to make the household run more like her mother's and help us all get a decent night's sleep.
But as reasonable as these attempts at change seemed to me, they caused huge upheaval—between her and me, between him and me. "No TV until your homework's done, remember?" I would urge him to remind her on my way out for the evening, inciting a tantrum. The TV would go off, but the second I was out the door, I would discover later, my fiancé would let her turn it back on. I told him that yes, she should have to go to school the next morning, but he would tell her that if she wanted, she could stay home. On and on it went. I felt undermined and grimly determined, some days, to "win," though I wasn't exactly sure what winning meant. We argued and pushed and negotiated—with each other, with her—constantly. There were clashes and preteen tantrums and tears; the house roiled with drama. Contractors being contractors, the wall was still just a concept for much of our coming-together period, and that only made matters worse.
"Please tell her to go to bed," I would say some nights, frayed and impatient from listening to the TV blaring downstairs, unable to close the door that didn't exist in a wall that had yet to be built.
"Oh, just relax," he would reply, implying that I was overreacting.
And the fight was on.
Stepmothers become the bad guys in the family system quickly. In pointing out problems, we become the problem. We come to seem shrill, rigid, and intolerant almost overnight. Compared to laissezfaire dads, we are party poopers par excellence. We fight with our partners about how the kids behave, feel resented by kids who resent us (and perhaps resent them in return), and are quickly villainized by everyone in the household, including ourselves. Seeing ourselves transformed this way—turned into stereotypical stepmonsters when we have the best intentions—can take a tremendous toll on our self-esteem. "I felt like an awful person," at least a dozen women with stepchildren told me in describing the early months and years of stepmotherhood.
As for the kids, there are new household rules, new household members, changes in the usual routines—all of which seem custom designed to incite confusion, insecurity, and hostility in a child. Feeling threatened by the changes, the kids will surely respond by making it clear that you are the outsider, the interloper, and they are the ones who belong here with Daddy. After all, experts point out, it's so much easier for his children to be angry at expendable, unnecessary Stepmom, to blame her for changes, than to confront beloved Dad or process the fact that they're mad at him, too. This intense polarization of the household (discussed at length in chapter 6) can create a sense that Dad is somehow a passive and torn victim caught in the middle as his wife and child battle it out. In fact, by not making it clear to his kids that Stepmom is here to stay and working with her to form a coalition, Dad may actually be orchestrating much of the household tension in these initial stages of stepfamily formation. (This is discussed at length in chapter 5.) Other dads/husbands may unconsciously enjoy being in the middle, since it means being the object of everyone's attention and desire. One woman told me that when she got home from work every evening and walked over to greet and kiss her fiancé, his ten-year-old daughter would rush past her to sit on his lap. Don't even think about it, the girl's actions said. The woman's fiancé never said a word, contributing to her sense that she was "making a big deal out of nothing," which in turn made her enormously resentful. "There was just this big, unspoken tension I couldn't even mention," this woman explained.
Transparent as it is, this possessiveness and territorialism about Daddy—especially if the couple never finds a way to acknowledge and defuse it—can be wearing for a woman trying to adjust to life with a new partner and his kids. It is likely to be particularly difficult if she has no children of her own to counterbalance the sense that they are the family and she is the party crasher. These feelings are only exacerbated by the typical scenario in which a childless woman moves in with a man with kids from a previous union and winds up finding herself on unfamiliar ground in all kinds of ways.
Even if a woman doesn't make the mistakes I did—even if she has the smarts or the self-control to hold back, to go with the flow, to surrender to the way things are in the household for a while before coming up with a reasonable, strategic plan to change things slowly—she is likely to be resented in the first tumultuous years of becoming a stepmother. This is not only because she's a convenient screen for the kids' anger at Dad for changing the order of things. Prominent stepfamily researchers Marilyn Coleman, Ed.D., and Lawrence Ganong, Ph.D., of the University of Missouri are among the many who note that when a stepparent, particularly a stepmother, comes on the scene, children begin to feel intense conflicts of loyalty. "Liking the stepparent raises their anxiety and makes them feel guilty about being disloyal to their [mother]," Coleman and Ganong explain. These tortured feelings intensify if Mom communicates to her kids, directly or indirectly, that Dad's remarriage (and hence Stepmom) is making her miserable. If stepmoms think they can overcome this conundrum simply by liking their stepkids and being likable themselves, and by giving the kids time to come around, they are wrong. Experts such as Coleman and Ganong have found that the nicer, the more appealing, and the more attractive a child finds a stepmother, the worse these feelings of divided loyalty will be, and the more intensely the stepmother will be rejected. Counterintuitively, then, our niceness often backfires. "The more I try, the more he retreats," Laynie sighed, while describing her relationship with her nine-year-old stepson, Teddy. "And when he has a good time with me, he feels guilty." It is hard, thankless work to reach out to a child in a loyalty bind.
Thirty-eight-year-old Brenda described her initial hunch about how her relationship with her husband's son would unfold: "My friends' kids like me. I'm a young, approachable, and fun person. I do things a kid might consider cool, like hang-gliding. And I don't want to replace [my stepson's] mom; I just want to be his friend. So he'll like me, and I'll like him" But after ten years together, her stepson has yet to warm up to her, and Brenda is getting tired of the rebuffs, which she largely attributes to "him thinking it's not fair to his mom to like me and him just hating all adults in charge right now. I don't really try to have a relationship with him anymore." Brenda's case is especially hard because she is now dealing with a teenager. Those of us who come into our stepkids' lives when they are preadolescents or adolescents will, experts such as psychologist E. Mavis Hetherington tell us, have the hardest time of all, but not necessarily because of anything we do. The developmental imperative of the adolescent, researchers who study stepfamilies explain, is to separate, while the stepmother and her partner are likely feeling the imperative to blend. So when a family is forming at just this moment in the child's life, it gives new meaning to the concept of being at cross-purposes (see chapter 3). "Kids are at great pains to show they have no use for a parent at this point in their lives," Manhattan psychoanalyst Stephanie Newman, Ph.D., told me. "They're rejecting and impossible even to the people they love most. Can you imagine how they're going to treat a stepparent?" Brenda can. "I've never had anybody be so rude to me in my life," she said flatly.
Even if the stepkids aren't teens, yet another factor puts stepmothers and stepchildren or stepchildren-to-be at odds. The thing that gives a woman with stepchildren such great happiness—her partnership—is the death knell of the kids' fantasy that Mom and Dad will get back together. There is a reason, the experts tell us, that kids love movies such as Disney's The Parent Trap, in which resourceful twin girls drive their stepmother-to-be out of the picture, effecting a mother-father reunion. Such fantasies of reconciliation are not just the stuff of fiction; they are profoundly real, if unconscious, often even into the adult years. British psychotherapist Sarah Corrie, Ph.D., who treats adults with stepparents, reports that even well into middle age, her patients are sometimes devastated to belatedly confront the reality that Dad and Mom will not be getting back together. Stepmom is the proof that the dream is over, and often it is held against her. If Dad is a widower, Stepmom is living proof that he is moving on, and this, too, can create tremendous sadness or resentment in both children and full-grown adults.
And what about us? It certainly can be disorienting to realize that the most important development of your life, a relationship that you perhaps feel you cannot live without, is shattering another person's dream. "When we told my husband's two girls that we were getting married, they started crying hysterically," forty-year-old Cindy told me. "Then came weeks of acting out. They were nine and thirteen. I had put in a lot of effort with them and had lots of good times, but I had also put up with a lot of rudeness and anger. And I remember thinking, Can't it be easy just once?"
The big day itself is likely to be fraught, to put it mildly. I heard a number of stories about grown children crying through the entire wedding ceremony and children old enough to know better throwing tantrums at just the wrong moment. Before becoming a stepmother myself, I had never considered how disconcerting and hurtful that sobbing and acting out, or even a simple lack of enthusiasm, could be for a woman who was supposed to be at the center of something beautiful, and who may have been looking forward to this day for decades.
Women and men with children from a previous relationship consolidate their lives in different ways, but none of them are easy. A "simple stepfamily" (quite a misnomer) is one in which a childless woman marries a man with children; he is often older than she is. She generally moves in with him, and custody arrangements being what they are, she is more likely to be a part-time (or "nonresidential") than a full-time (or "residential") stepmother to his kids. If it sounds "simple," it isn't. Research confirms that, counterintuitively, part-time stepmothering is the most difficult arrangement of all. First, part-time status leads to confusion about your role. Are you a weekend mother figure? An every-other-holiday friend? Balancing being a friend and being an adult who gets respect can be difficult indeed, but doing so at infrequent or unpredictable intervals is more difficult still. "We just never got into a groove, because they weren't around much. Now that they're young adults, it's even harder to figure out how to be with them when they're around," one woman told me about her stepsons.
Uncertainty about how to act dogs nearly every stepmother, but particularly the nonresidential ones. Experts even have a special term for their confusion about how they should be with their stepkids: "role ambiguity." Think of yourself as another parent. Think of yourself as a friend. Think of yourself more like an aunt. The advice goes on and on. It's no wonder stepmothers don't know how to act or who to be.
These part-time arrangements also leave women with very little time to build a relationship with his kids. Being together for intense, weekends-only increments ratchets up the pressure—I only have two days! —and the exhaustion. "We just ran around trying to keep them happy and entertained all the time, because that is what my fiancé got them used to," forty-five-year-old Hope told me about the first year of her relationship with her husband and his seven-year-old twins. "I have always really cared about his kids. But it got exhausting with our weekends always revolving around them." All of what experts call our "affinity-seeking behaviors"—that is, our attempts to get our stepkids to like us, attempts we are likely to have all the more energy for and optimism about when we don't have kids of our own—can be draining indeed. "In my practice, I've seen stepmothers jump through all kinds of hoops to get on the good side of their stepkids," Stephanie Newman observed. "Overextending yourself this way is depleting and can lead you to really resent them when they reject you in all the ways that are pretty normal." Trying to discipline stepchildren too early can be disastrous, yet being walked on doesn't feel good either. Women whose stepchildren are there only part-time are more often expected to "just let it go—they're only there once in a while." This often means that these women are expected to swallow their feelings, while the stepkids' snippy remarks or hostility go unchecked for years.
Overall, simple stepfamily partnerships are often characterized by imbalances of power. According to Jamie Kelem Keshet, Ed.D., a stepmother, author, and psychotherapist in private practice in Newton, Massachusetts,
The husband who is older is often more successful than his wife. He often expects her to move into his home because he owns it, it is bigger than her apartment and/or his children are already accustomed to spending time there. Several wives in this position expressed the sense that their husbands merely wanted them to fill an empty place in their lives, rather than to build a new life together from the ground up. The women felt they were blocked when they requested changes in the family home or lifestyle.
Like the women who spoke with Keshet, I began, eventually, to chafe at the way I perceived I had been shunted into my husband's life on his terms. I had donated my furniture, sold my car, and moved in with him and his daughter, turning my entire life upside down, I felt, while he hadn't altered so much as a throw pillow. Compounding the problem was the fact that my husband lived near his extended family, while I lived far from mine. And so at big family dinners or on stays at the family vacation compound, the kindness of my in-laws notwithstanding (and they were kind), I sometimes felt like a barnacle that had affixed itself to a coral reef: tacked on, overwhelmed. Often I had the sensation that the old me had been swallowed up, disappearing without a trace. Going out with my friends was a wonderful counterbalance. They were my version of family, and among them I felt myself in familiar, friendly territory again.
The house was another matter. It had become a hostile environment. In an attempt to help me feel more at home, my husband had agreed to a little redecorating, something many couples in such a position undertake, it turns out, as a way to try to reset the balance. But these changes—representing, as they did, far more profound ones—did not go over well with his girls. "This looks totally weird," my husband's daughter pronounced acidly when she saw how we had altered the living room. "And I like my mom's curtains better."
"I hate this room. I hate your bedspread, and I hate your lamp," her sister told me when she walked into our bedroom. "That's okay," I responded flatly, by now worn down their hostility. "It's not your room." I wanted to add, Feel free to stay out.
Unfortunately, our sense that we are extraneous, unnecessary, and excluded and that our stepchildren seem to want to drive us away or split us from our partners may dog us for years. Patricia Papernow coined the term "intimate outsider" to explain the paradoxical nature of our position, the sense of simultaneous exclusion, estrangement, and enmeshment with "them" that stepmothers invariably describe. Most insidiously, our outsider status can leech away our sense of ourselves as good, loving, and lovable people, rendering the most self-confident among us insecure, off-kilter, occasionally even bitter. The outsider role is the special burden of women who come to their husbands without children of their own.
But women with children of their own who marry men with kids also face many of the same pitfalls I did, plus a few others. They confront the daunting task of trying to bring two family cultures together and of dealing with the inevitable conflicts that will arise as man and wife and kids and kids try to reconcile many different rituals (What time is dinner? Is the seder long or short? What day does the Christmas tree go up?); expectations ("Why do I have to share a room?" "Do we have to go to Florida for vacation just because that's what Stepdad and his kids always do?"); and philosophies ("You're strict with us, but Stepdad's kids never get in trouble!" "We have to do chores, but his kids don't."). Not to mention the agonizing turf wars over deciding who will live where, and the wear and tear on the couple as different kids change their minds and their residency again and again (as research indicates is typical in remarriages with children).
More than just logistical matters, there are emotional ones as well. Many mothers who married men with kids told me they felt that their husbands' kids, having fewer rules, were a bad influence on, or even hostile toward, their own kids. Sally told me that her husband's kids were "very angry and very defiant, and they weren't careful with toys and things. My kids were mild and got steamrolled sometimes. It made me feel guilty!" The upside of this type of merger, then, is also its downside. In having kids, the woman feels part of what Jamie Kelem Keshet calls her own "mini-family," rather than simply feeling excluded from his mini-family. This can give her a sense of belonging, but it can also create pressure to protect her kids, and it can factionalize the household as each parent sticks up for his or her own kids in disputes (see chapter 6).
Fortunately, there is some good news here. The man with kids who divorces and remarries "is very likely to be doing it for the right reasons this time, and to want to get it right," Mary Ann Feldstein, Ed.D., a Manhattan psychotherapist who has worked with couples with stepchildren, told me. Many of my interview subjects felt lucky to have husbands who had learned the value of communication and the need to work at a marriage, a quality they said they didn't see as often in first-married men. As one man told me, "The first time was a disaster. Then I got this second chance. Why do it again if I wasn't going to commit to it and make it the most important thing in my life?" The numbers bear him out. Although the divorce rate for remarriages with children is dramatically higher than that for remarriages without children in the first three years, such marriages, having passed the three-year mark, are actually more likely to survive than first marriages. In fact, after about five years, researchers have found, a remarriage with children is more likely to succeed than any other type of marriage. The extraordinary effort of coping with the ordinary struggles of stepfamily life, it seems, cements couples who do not succumb to the pressures early on. Passing through this crucible is more than worth it, my subjects who managed to come out on the other side told me over and over. "Marriage is hard, but marriage with stepchildren is so much harder," a stepmother in her late sixties told me over lunch one day. She went on to describe her own experience as "hell that makes you happier and stronger after the fact. My husband and I are so much closer for all the drama his kids brought to the picture and all the arguing we did."
There is not a single way to be a stepmother. Nor, it turns out, is there a "right" one. Some women embrace the role, throwing their entire beings into forging a relationship with their husbands' kids; other women, like Laynie, think of stepmothering as a "not-me experience, something I want to get right out of a sense of duty to my husband and his son, but it's not central to who I am." And often, a woman's experience of stepmothering, and of herself as a stepmother, will change over the years. "Things were easy when they were little, but now they're on the verge of becoming stormy preteens. So I'm trying to strike a balance between being kind of a mommy and a reliable friend," Ella told me.
The simple fact that there are many ways to be a stepmother may seem pretty extraordinary to those of us who have had it drummed into our heads that there is one "best" way to do it. Soon after I married, I told a friend over the phone that "my daughter" was with us for the weekend, feeling that my use of the term "stepdaughter" might strike her as unfriendly. My friend was completely flummoxed—had I suddenly had a child?—and my older stepdaughter and I both cringed the moment I said it: she, I imagine, at my presumption, and I at my hypocrisy. That model of stepmothering—the one where the line between mother and stepmother blurs—was not for us. My younger stepdaughter, however, sometimes refers to her father and me as "my parents," other times we are "my dad and my stepmom" or just "Dad and Wednesday." Different kids, different days, different stages, different roles. Nothing about being a stepmother is written in stone.
One-size-fits-all expectations of what's "right" only increase the tensions in a stepfamily, fueling feelings of inadequacy and resentment with every perceived failure to do things "correctly" or make the family just like a "real" (first) family. As it turns out, there are actually several ways to be in a marriage to a man with children. Some presage better outcomes. Some are not so much stepmothering styles as reactions to specific circumstances and experiences. But in general, researchers seem to have discovered that who we are, who his kids are, and who the other players in the remarriage scenario are all help determine whether and how we will act as stepmothers. For this reason, we can't simply "choose" a stepmothering style from a menu, any more than we can choose our own eye color. But getting a sense of what kind of stepmother we feel like—anywhere at all along the spectrum that extends from "not a stepmother at all" to "just like another mom"—is a good way to get oriented when we're feeling lost or overwhelmed. A few studies provide a loose stepmothering "map."
When psychologists Ann Orchard, Psy.D., and Kenneth Solberg, Ph.D., asked 265 women how they would characterize the relationship with their stepchildren, 25 percent chose "respectful/polite." Almost the same number described it as "friendly/caring," and just slightly fewer characterized the relationship as "distant." The answers were not mutually exclusive; many women chose more than one description, or even all three, to sum up how they felt. Their answers to the next question, "How would you describe your role?" showed just how creative we can be in the absence of clear guidelines about being a stepmother. Thirty-three percent thought of their role as "another parent/mother-like." Another 31 percent described their role as "a friend/supportive adult," while half that number felt that their role was "Dad's wife/support to Dad." Sadly, 13 percent thought of their role as "outsider," while 10 percent chose the truly alienated-sounding descriptor "household organizer." Like other researchers, Orchard and Solberg found that the "friendship style" of stepmothering—characterized more, it seems, by noninterference and the absence of conflict or getting involved in parenting than by an actual reciprocal friendliness—was the "most functional" model. A stepmom named Belinda told me of her relationship with her husband's now young-adult daughters, "I wanted an aunt type of role. Supportive, a plus to have in your life, someone you could turn to. Not the disciplinarian."
Another study, of thirty-two Israeli couples by University of Washington researcher Pauline Erera-Weatherley, Ph.D., found four stepmothering styles: the super-good stepmom; the detached stepmom; the uncertain stepmom; and the friend. The super-good stepmoms were reacting to a stereotype. Petrified by the specter of the wicked stepmother, they bent over backward to prove themselves kind, were rebuffed nonetheless, and tended to feel unappreciated by their stepchildren, husbands, and in-laws. It is not hard to imagine these women deciding that their efforts weren't worth it, then withdrawing, angry and defeated, from their "families" and marriages. This was exactly the direction I saw upbeat, sunny Kendra moving in when I interviewed her. She had thrown herself entirely into the task of mothering the teenage stepdaughter who lived with her and her husband, but after years of rejection, she told me, she was ready to throw in the towel. "I don't think anybody realizes how hard I've tried," she said. "In fact, I don't think they even notice."
Erera-Weatherley found that the detached stepmothers were minimally involved in their stepchildren's lives. This style tended to be something of a default mode, one the women adopted after feeling rebuffed and rejected in their friendly or parental overtures toward their stepchildren. "I'm just done with this," one long-term stepmother told me, "done with trying and not getting any warmth back. So I'm not putting myself out so much anymore." Several other stepmothers echoed this sentiment (as discussed in chapters 4 and 10).
Meanwhile, stepmothers with the uncertain style expressed doubt, uncertainty, distress, and confusion in Erera-Weatherley's study. Many of them, like me, had had no experience of parenting before becoming a stepparent. One woman said, "I feel like I'm alone. I don't know exactly what I am supposed to do. Should I react [to my stepchild doing something provocative]? Should I not react?" These women felt very apprehensive about criticizing, confronting and quarreling with their stepchildren. It is not hard to see how their stepkids would eventually become very empowered and, as stepfamily expert James Bray puts it, end up calling the shots on the emotional trajectory of stepfamily life.
The last style, friend, was pointedly "nonparental," yet characterized by conveying a sense of caring and being available. With the adoption of this style, Erera-Weatherley noted, women seemed to accept their stepchildren without necessarily expecting themselves to love the kids or to be loved in return: "We developed friendly contact. He hugs me...[but] there is no real love between us. I don't act like a natural mother, but I take care of [my stepchild]. I care about him, and I try to help my husband in his relationship with his son."
Although the "friend" seems to be the most rewarding and successful stepmothering style, a woman cannot simply choose it in an effort to improve stepfamily relations. For while the stepmother's own personality and attitudes about parenting and stepparenting play a role in determining which style she adopts, the expectations and behaviors of the stepchild, the father, and the mother are usually more important in determining how things will go and which of the roles the stepmom will play. For example, I spoke with a stepmother named Dana. The mother of Dana's stepdaughter, Tania, moved across the country when the girl was nine, tacitly ceding all mothering duties to Dana. Not long after, Tania's father and Dana broke up, with Dana retaining custody of the girl. Not surprisingly, Dana describes herself as Tania's "mommy," a sentiment Tania reciprocates. Another stepmom, Gabby, found herself cast into the role of villain by her husband's ex-wife, who communicated both implicitly and explicitly to her children that to befriend Gabby would be to betray her. Gabby's good intentions and efforts were hobbled by other circumstances, agendas over which she had no control.
Stepmothering does not happen in a vacuum, but rather within a force field of other relationships. A stepmother's own preferences and efforts are only one piece of a larger puzzle of determining factors, probably the least important of all. Knowing this, perhaps we will begin to give ourselves permission to feel less responsible for outcomes with his children.
Several months after I moved in with my fiancé, the wall finally went up. His daughters seemed displeased. The younger one sulked and stormed away from me more often. She wanted badly to provoke me, it seemed, and too often I obliged her. I had largely abandoned my project to win her over. There seemed to be very little payoff, and the more hostile she was toward me, the less inclined I was to continue to try. We lived under the same roof but in different worlds, in a kind of perpetual standoff. I had sunk to her level, and on my worst days, I resented her and my fiancé terribly for it. But part of me was concerned about her. We had had good times together, and occasionally still did, and it saddened me to see that the transitions in the household were so rough on her.
I often found myself wondering, Why does it all have to be so difficult? Why does she dislike me? What am I doing wrong? Then, like a lot of women who marry men with kids and ask these questions, I heard the voices:
They're part of the package. Suck it up.
You're not the important one here; she is. Stop being so selfish.
My own response to this stepmothering reality—the stress, the competition, the judgments, the ambivalence, the ambiguity, the being rebuffed—was to bunker down, erect a fort, dig a moat of sorts. I built a wall. The truth is that this many years into it, I am not, and do not aspire to be, a stepmother who says, "Just show up. Stay as long as you want. This is your home!" I have drawn lines and set boundaries that have nothing to do with the way I was sure I would be. This bewilders me, since I have come to really like my stepdaughters and am the person eve ryone told:
His daughters are going to love you.
You won't have any wicked stepmother nonsense to deal with. You're not like that.
Those girls are so lucky. I wish you were my stepmom!
You'll be the nicest, funnest stepmom in the world.
I built a wall. It sounds predictable when I write it. Wicked. But building walls was, for me, unavoidable, inevitable, a question of survival. I was a new stepmother. And in spite of everything we have been taught about stepmothers, everything we are sure we know about them, I felt powerless, vulnerable, and very afraid. I was frightened of my own feelings, of my ambivalence, and of the ugliness that these new, intense relationships brought out in me. I built a wall—a lot of them, in fact—because I needed a place to hide, a place to remember who I really was, to figure out what I was becoming. A new stepmother, any sort of stepmother, it seems to me, needs a wall of her own, and a place to be.